Original subtitles

[MUSIC PLAYING]

INSTRUCTOR: Depending on the film,

the beginning is officially the spotting session.

You sit with the editor, and sometimes the producer,

and certainly, the director.

And you run the film top to bottom.

And in running the film top to bottom, you find every moment.

Music starts here.

Music starts here.

It runs 2 minutes and 15 seconds,

and it kind of comes out here.

Now you give that a number, and the number is based--

again, this is an antiquated system,

but it's still how we do it.

It might be-- it's in the first reel of the film.

So it's the fifth piece of music.

So it's 1m05.

Reel 1, music 5.

And I'll encourage the director during the spotting session

to talk about it a little bit.

Tell me the thing you're concerned about.

So I've had spotting sessions that take two days, where

literally, the director wants to talk about it so much,

we can only spot half the movie in one day

and half on the next day.

It happens, and that's just director to director.

And the other extreme would be Tim Burton,

who, if the movie is an hour 45 long,

the spotting session will be an hour 55.

He doesn't like to talk about the movie.

He just doesn't like to talk about it.

So I'll encourage him to say something about the cue.

So he might just go, make sure this is sad,

or make sure this gets really hopeful here.

OK, next.

And so we're basically just starting and stopping

and really defining music starts,

music stops, giving it a name and a number.

I should add that the really important thing

about the spotting session is everybody now knows

how long the score is.

And there's a huge budgetary condition

because it's abstract.

Well, we think there's about 60 minutes of music,

but the spotting comes in at 75.

Everybody's got to adjust the budget and the number of days

of recording for 75 minutes, rather than 60.

Or it's the other way.

Well, the music only came in at 51 minutes.

OK, we're actually really good, or we could even maybe give up

one session.

So from the studio standpoint, this

is actually a very important moment

because they're going to get a number.

And that number is going to tell them how many sessions,

how big of an orchestra.

And there's a huge budgetary process that has to happen,

and that also begins with the spotting session.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Temp music is the bane of every composer.

And that's a huge part of a composer's job.

Now, some directors are remarkably unconnected,

disconnected from the temp music.

And that is just like having a huge weight lifted off

of my shoulders when I sit down with the director

and I'm looking at a film for the first time.

Because usually, the very first time I see it,

it's going to have a temp score.

Because I'm actually looking at some kind of preview

cut that they're generally looking at.

Sometimes it's not.

Like, again, some directors are just literally showing me

the film on an editing machine.

And I'll say, just play me a cue you're in love with.

And so I don't want to hear anything that you don't think

is really important.

I just want to hear the ones that you're

getting attached to.

Because I want to know what kind of battle

I'm going to have ahead of me.

So it's not uncommon for a first viewing to have, like,

three or four half a dozen temp moments and the rest out.

Sometimes I'm looking at, like, a rough preview,

where there's a full temp score from beginning to end.

And I will hope never to see it again.

They may have been working on this film for a year

before I got there, and they've been hearing a temp

score for close to a year--

parts of it for a year and parts of it maybe for half a year.

An animation-- that could be two years.

So, what you got to do is two things.

There's two ways to go about it.

You can do what I might conservatively say

70% of the composers today do.

And they just do the temp.

Take it, you find another way to do it.

You have the exact tempo.

You actually map the tempo out of the temp score,

and you do something else to the same temp, hitting things--

different piece of music, different melody,

but you're going to do the same thing.

That is bullshit.

And I know it works for some people, but it's bullshit.

It's not doing your job.

Your job is to come up with something fresh and new.

And yeah, there's a certain point

where the director could beat you down

by refusing your music two times, five times, seven times,

10 times.

And eventually, you go, all right.

I'll try to understand what the fucking temp is doing

and see how I can modify mine to do something,

at least close enough that it connects with a director.

But that's the misery of the job, as far as I'm concerned.

And sometimes you simply have no choice.

But you try.

You got to try.

You got to try to get in there, and shake it all away.

Make it all disappear.

And the only thing I might pay attention from the temp

is where, OK, a director got used to hitting

a certain thing I go, OK.

He really wants to hit this moment, fine.

I'll hit this moment.

I don't have a problem with that.

Because I could take any piece of music I do any time

and make it hit a moment.

Occasionally, there's something that's not big and obvious,

but the director feels like they want

to hit this or this particular moment a certain way.

And you gotta learn these things.

So this is a problem every composer

has to face all the time.

The cheap way out is just follow the temp.

The hard way out is put up this fierce, polite fight.

And by fierce, meaning when you're fierce with a director,

you have to do it in a very careful way.

Because if you just come off as arrogant and fiercely attached

to your own ways, the director is going to equally dig in,

and you're going to end up coming to a real problem.

So the way you do it fiercely is to simply fiercely commit

yourself to come up with something really good

that you believe in and see if you

could find an easy way to pull your director into that world.

Do variations of it.

Show I could take this melody, I could take this thing

and turn it into this type of moment.

I could turn it into that type of moment.

And then the director might go, oh, that's nice.

So they may not be sold on this moment I'm showing them,

but I've already shown them a moment

towards the end of the film, and they love that.

And now they're coming back to the first one and going,

I'm there.

I've got it.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Scoring a film with big or small resources

is not even something I give two thoughts about because if it's

a $200 million movie, first off, they

can still cry to you about the size of the orchestra.

I mean, it's amazing.

Really big orchestras and big films, big budgets, and I've

been asked, can you please cut four players out of the violin

section?

But the point is, is that you're going

to encounter potentially every kind of big, small,

in between during your careers.

If it's a tiny budget, which I've done many of,

I'm going, all right.

We can actually afford seven musicians for two days.

And I can use three or four musicians

for one of the sessions beyond that for solos,

or three or four soloists.

And I go, that's my budget.

No big deal.

What I advise you is don't try to do what they did in the '80s

and into the '90s and emulate orchestra sound

with synthetic orchestras.

That's crap.

It's always been crap, and it's still crap.

To cut costs and not degrade the quality of your work,

I believe you think small.

Other than that, its inventiveness.

I mean, there's great scores from small ensembles

from inventive composers.

And to show invention is a great thing

if you can show that you can work with a tiny budget

and do a very inventive score with interesting sounds.

Obviously, if you're into synthetics,

that could really help you there because there's

no limit to what you can do.

But even with real instruments, get a lot out of a few players.

I think that's really useful.

If you need to present a big orchestral sound

and you have no budget, you're screwed.

I mean, I played demos all the time

for people that are all synthetic.

Every director-- here is my entire score,

fully orchestrated in demo form before it

goes to the scoring stage.

But that's just for a director to hear.

That's a facsimile.

I did a movie that the director wanted

a particularly kind of a romantic, lush sound out

of the strings.

The movie was called "Hitchcock,"

and he wanted a score that felt like it

was connected to the era.

And he wanted very warm strings, and he wanted a lot of romance

in it.

And that's the kind of score that my demos

are delivering the least amount of satisfaction

to the director.

He kept wanting warmth, warmth, warmer.

And I was playing these demos, and I kept saying to him,

I can't get warmth out of samples.

Trust me, it's just going to be a whole different thing.

And he was nervous right up until the first scoring

session.

It was in London, and we're sitting there

for the first cue.

And I could just see his whole body language relax

because he's like listening.

He's worried, he's worrying, and it started playing.

And he just settled in, and he barely said anything

for the rest of the scoring.

It was more than what he was hoping for,

because the warmth of the real strings filling

the room for this particular score

was something that I just couldn't give him

synthetically.